K.P Singh , Chairman Emeritus, DLF
Today, the pace at which India is growing, we need an overhaul of our urban planning approach. Looking at our urban spaces, we find them to be in a mess as they get worse with traffic snarls and other civic woes during extreme weather events like heavy rains.
There is a need to not just plan big but enforce plans with rigidity. A complete reorientation of thinking is required in urban planning at the top level . We need to have long-term planning up to as many as 100 years, keeping in view the anticipated population growth and urban needs.
Our urban infrastructure should be based on future thinking. We need visionary and careful planning as any mistake at the initial stage of planning is difficult to rectify later. Our urgent task should be to address urban infrastructure as an issue of national priority. For this a high-powered cabinet rank committee comprising far-sighted urban planners, environmentalists and visionaries from the private sector ,should be constituted to do long-term planning with a vision. How forward thinking helps in planning our cities well, is clearly evident from Chandigarh and Lutyens Delhi.
India is set to emerge as a third largest economy and this growth demands substantial urban infrastructure to handle increasing population movement. This calls for a serious look at our infrastructure. The 2010 Mckinsey Global Institute Report had outlined that India needed to build one Chicago every year to meet its urban development needs. But since then not a single new city has come up. It is not easy to build a new city as one confronts several challenges related to planning, land acquisition, finances . It is not that every new city we develop will be a success story. The case of Lavasa and Sahara City is before us. But we have to do it well.
Today, we find urban chaos with cities like Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru struggling with infrastructure issues. In our cities, quality of life is poor with bad air quality, narrow roads leading to traffic congestion and lack of proper parking, in addition to inadequate water supply and drainage.Gurgaon where we have developed DLF City, is a picture of infrastructure mess.It is not how I had envisioned Gurgaon. It was meant to be greener and more organised with better civic infrastructure, but today it is often referred to as a glaring example of how a city ought not to be planned.
Considering the rapid speed at which India is growing today, we need more cities. But that’s not happening. After Gurgaon not one new city has come up. We need a PPP model for urban development to speed up development of new cities. We must have a development model on the lines of Noida. The government should take on the responsibility of land acquisition from farmers offering fair compensation to them. Thereafter, the land should be auctioned to those who can develop/deliver it for various uses.
What we need today is to rectify our flawed master planning and come up with a proactive and visionary approach. We need to come out of the mould of a small mindset and our urban planning should shift from a myopic to surplus mindset.
Based on K.P Singh’s media interaction
1
2
3
4
5
6